sport news With 12 wins in a row, this classy Wales team cannot stay under the radar 

The greatest Welsh team in history? Mind games. Everyone agreed. When Eddie Jones talked up the opposition prior to arriving in Cardiff, he was merely trying to mess with their heads.

Flatter them into complacency, or make them feel pressure.

He was trying to turn them English. Trying to give Wales the issues his England team live with daily.

Warren Gatland summed up the difference. Wales, he said, had been allowed to travel under the radar, England came expected to win by 15 points, maybe more.

Yet Wales had already equalled a national record of 11 consecutive wins that had stood since 1910.

England had delivered one very impressive performance against Ireland in Dublin, and beaten a flaky French team at home.

How can that be? How can history-makers, as Wales now are, exist in comparative obscurity? Why is so much expected of England? Boom or bust, Jones called it. ‘It’s part of English sport,’ he said. ‘You guys love it. That’s what you’re about.

‘You’re happy when it’s bust and you’re happy when it’s boom. I can’t control that. We’ve got to be good enough to see the truth, the reality of it.’

Yet asked what that reality was, Jones’s reply was unenlightening. ‘That we weren’t good enough today,’ he added. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve got to say it.

‘They were too good for us, and there’s no shame in that. There was no lack of effort, no lack of tactics. We just weren’t good enough but we’ll learn from that.

‘These things happen. Sometimes you get beaten by a better team, and you’ve just got to lick your wounds and get on with it.’

Yes, except it’s World Cup year, and England are running out of time to lick wounds and get on with anything. Gatland’s appraisal of a group who have fallen short on some big occasions of late seemed nearer that reality.

The win in Ireland appeared a turning point but not if that level cannot be maintained.

England are a good team, and any good team will deliver good results on an ad hoc basis, but great teams win World Cups, and great teams are those who go out and win over and over again: 12 times, for instance.

Now all sorts of caveats can be placed against Wales’ streak. It can be said that the 12 games do not include a fixture with the best team in Europe (Ireland) or the best team in the southern hemisphere, New Zealand. One of those tests is ahead, as the climax to this Six Nations Championship, so we shall see.

Yet the run does embrace three other leading nations — South Africa, Australia and Argentina — and now England.